Here on the bottom,
I push my fingers into the mud,
with all the music of the world,
muffled and receding.
There is no hand.
The sun cuts the gray and sheds itself
on leaves that blur in lines,
faded and unreal as memory —
a sediment heavy as stone
and the all-devouring dream.
A Cooper’s hawk is winding upward —
the alarm in his scream is lost
in this inward pressure,
the caress of cold water —
the collected rain that runs from this place.
There was still so much to say.
Slowly everything is carried away —
voice and vision,
wind and water,
blood and bone.
Everything is lost at last to its turning.

the words of banishing were on my lips but when my feet hit the ice they were only the second pair to make tracks on the fresh-fallen snow and I followed the coyote’s meander round a bent wood and through cattails and up down a hill past curious chickadees and rising again found him — the fog of his disappearing breaths — so close and for a moment felt the fear and enticement of prey

So this is what we can be:
a star so faint
as to be only
peripherally visible,
and transitory as moonlight
caught in an icicle.
None can take the care
to see —
so small and shrinking
to this pale point of light,
then blinking —
a remote pulse that fades
and disappears
with the night.